Kerouac's On The Road and the American Quest

Jack Kerouac's On The Road is the most uniquely American novel of its time. While it has never fared well with academics, On The Road has come to symbolize for many an entire generation of disaffected young Americans. One can focus on numerous issues when addressing the novel, but the two primary reasons which make the book uniquely American are its frantic Romantic search for the great American hero (and ecstasy in general), and Kerouac's "Spontaneous Prose" method of writing.

On The Road is an autobiographical first-person book written in 1951 and based on Kerouac's experiences of the late 1940's. At the time, America was undergoing drastic changes and the sense of sterility brought on by a mechanized Cold War era society resulted in a feeling of existential dislocation for many. Numerous Americans began to experience a sense of purposelessness and the air was rife with disillusionment. Kerouac was one of these restless postwar young people and he longed for...something. A new kind of hero? A return to a Romantic tradition and simpler days? When Kerouac met Neal Cassady, he knew Cassady was the kind of hero he had been seeking. Eventually, as Robert Hipkiss notes, "Kerouac began to see Neal as an 'archetypal American Man' "....and, in fact, when Kerouac created Dean Moriarty out of Neal, "he created a new symbol of flaming American youth, the American hero of the Beat Generation" (32-3). Indeed, as Hipkiss argues, Dean Moriarty

is the most singular hero of the road America has ever had.

Mixing the individualism of the freeborn American with that

great present-day extension of this freedom, the motor car,

he extends himself literally across the continent in all

directions. (42)

Dean and Kerouac's alter ego, Sal, represent one of the three main types of character patterns seen in '50s literature: that of the Rebel. And while representative of the rebellious James Dean-like figures of literature, they are perhaps even more representative of '50s youth culture in their endless searches. For what? The quest is left open for debate. Tim Hunt suggests that Kerouac could be searching for several things in On The Road: a father (or brother) figure, the chance to regain lost joy, or a type of revelation (91). Hipkiss contends that Neal's

speeding dashes down the road are as much flights of panic,

the fear of never making it, the fear of losing all the life

he ever had, as they are quests for ecstasy, which is itself

an escape from fear and the frustrations of desire. (43)

Of course, elements of restlessness surface in earlier American novelists such as Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but Kerouac's search for a type of identity in an era of increasing conformity sparked rebelliousness On The Road-style and encouraged many to, as Tim Leary would put it several years later, "tune in, turn on, and drop out."

As Kerouac's searches for the great American hero and ecstasy in general made On The Road uniquely American, so too does his style of writing. Kerouac's "search for ecstasy naturally led to the exploration of jazz" (Hipkiss 35), an art form purely America n, and both this search and this form of music manifested itself in Kerouac's method of "Spontaneous Prose." Jazz, and the jazz artist heroes, are born rebels to Kerouac, and they live the kind of frantic orgiastic experience (through their music as well as their lifestyles) sought by Dean and Sal:

The behatted tenorman was blowing at the peak of a

wonderfully satisfactory free idea, a rising and falling

riff that went from 'EE-yah!' to a crazier 'EE-de-lee-yah!'

and blasted along to the rolling crash of butt-scarred drums

hammered by a big brutal Negro.... Uproars of music and the

tenorman had it and everybody knew he had it.... They were

all urging that tenorman to hold it and keep it with cries

and wild eyes, and he was raising himself from a crouch and

going down again with his horn, looping it up in a clear cry

above the fervor.

Music and writing are two different modes of artistic expression, but Kerouac attempts to link the two in what he calls "Spontaneous Prose." This style of writing is distinctive and it became the subject of imitation for many later aspiring writers. Kerouac writes spontaneously, without stopping and with little concern for syntax and grammar as though he were a Miles Davis-inspired solo man. We see a similar method in current Expressivist based composition pedagogy, popularized by Peter Elbow, but the inspiration differs slightly. While Elbow advocates utilizing certain exorcises such as writing without stopping for specific time periods, Kerouac actually adheres to a type of structure. He bases this structure, as Lee Bartlett observes, on "jazz and bop, in the sense of a, say, tenorman drawing a breath, and blowing a phrase on his saxophone, till he runs out of breath, and when he does, his sentence, his statement's been made" (124). In his jazz-inspired style, Kerouac's "sentences are long, constantly shifting between narrative and observation, moving freely from the present to the past then back again" (Bartlett 124). Bartlett goes further:

because Kerouac makes no attempt to separate himself from

his narrator, his association becomes truly spontaneous in

the Wordsworthian sense, a rushing forth of a mind caught,

like the jazzman's, between surface "melody" and archaic

resonance, between world as fact and world as meaning. (125)

Anther element of Kerouac's style which makes On The Road a truly unique American novel is Kerouac's use of colloquial American prose. Prior to this novel, several authors had attempted to write in the voice of "the common man," but quite often were unable to pull it off successfully because their view of the common man usually seemed limited to the common educated man (Wordsworth, Coleridge, perhaps Salinger, et cetera). With Kerouac's use of his method of "Spontaneous Prose" and its natural association with jazz, he and the Beats, as Hipkiss states, "carried forward the hipster interest in jazz and the bop refusal to verbalize in standard, coherent form" (35). New expressions were invoked, terms such as "digging," "blowing," "cat," and many others. The language in the novel was truly the language of the new American it represented.

On The Road is certainly the unique American novel of the 1950's, but does it fit in fully with '50s era issues and elements? The novel, like many post-World War Two novels, is confessional and written in first person. The characters in the novel are representative of one of the three major type of post-War character: The Rebel. The novel is representative of an entire generation in its search for...something. A hero perhaps. A national identity.

On The Road has been compared favorably with several other important American novels, most notably The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby, however, as mentioned previously, it has never been treated well by critics. Is the book ultimately a failure, or can it be viewed as a significant achievement, worthy of representing a generation and an era, worthy of canonization? Criticisms abound, one of which holds that Sal, the narrator, is too (Romantically) naive. This same criticism could be leveled at Bellow and Plath, and seems to be harmless at best. In fact, as Hunt points out, "a careful examination of On The Road .. . shows that Kerouac deliberately exploits the naivete of his narrator" (3), utilizing it for thematic purposes. Hipkiss deconstructs his own criticism of the novel that in Dean and Sal's very passion for "digging" jazz, the road, and the ecstasy of life , they ironically "do not really successfully 'dig' the life they so briefly come in contact with on the road, "when he admits, "except for their unwillingness to take the time to experience what they pass through, they do have a predisposition to 'dig,' in that their attitude toward life is very accepting..." (39). In their very efforts to diminish the literary value of On The Road, the critics resort to grudging praise of its uniqueness.

The most important element, however, which makes On The Road an integral member of the '50s era canon and culture, is the fact that the conflict and issues within the novel are not resolved with the ending. This could be viewed by some as a criticism, but as George Dardess writes, "the absence of resolution need not deny fictional closure. It can substitute closure of a different kind, one appropriate to the narrated experience" (128). The characters in the novel are representative of living people and, as such, they are further representative of the very real fact that life is one continuous state of fluctuating, fluid attainment. An open ending is appropriate for On The Road because it is a manifestation of the reality of uncertainty which pervaded society in the 1950's and which Kerouac himself suffered from. Dardess notes that the book begins with Sal's constructions of boundaries in the first chapter "it ends with his discarding them.... The book moves from hierarchy to openness, from the limitation of possibilities to their expansion" (128).

Kerouac's hero is more of an anti-hero than anything. He is "quintessentially the lost, the wasted soul, the victim ... of the American dream as it has been realized by the abundant, comfortable, middle class" (Hipkiss 44). However, Kerouac's On The Road rates as a strongly affirmative novel. Sal's decision to make no choice is indicative, as Dardess elaborates, of the idea that:

the test of first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold

two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still

retain the ability to function. One should...be able to see

that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them

otherwise.... On The Road is an example of such a test's

being taken -- and passed.... (132)

Kerouac, like Bellow and Plath, sees that things are hopeless but he remains determined to go on, and on, and on....

Works Cited

Bartlett, Lee, ed. The Beats: Essays in Criticism. Jefferson, C.: McFarland, 1981.

Bartlett, Lee. "The Dionysian Vision of Jack Kerouac." Bartlett 115-26.

Dardess, George. "The Delicate Dynamics of Friendship: Reconsideration of Kerouac's On The Road."

Hipkiss, Robert A. Jack Kerouac: Prophet of the New Romanticism. Lawrence: Regents P of Kansas, 1976.

Hunt, Tim. Kerouac's Crooked Road. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1981.

Kerouac, Jack. On The Road. New York: Signet, 1957.